Maggie O’kane: Bringing the Guardian’s Ethos to Tv

Maggie O’Kane, the editorial director of Guardian Films, on bringing the paper’s ethos to the television screen. . I was a foreign correspondent for the paper, and it had taken me weeks of negotiations, dealing with shady contacts and a lot of walking to reach the cigar-smoking Karen twins…

Guardian Films – the newspaper’s new television production company – was born in a sleeping bag in the Burmese rainforest. I was a foreign correspondent for the paper, and it had taken me weeks of negotiations, dealing with shady contacts and a lot of walking to reach the cigar-smoking Karen twins – the boy soldiers who were leading attacks against the country’s ruling junta. After I had reached them and written a cover story for the newspaper’s G2 section, I got a call from the BBC’s documentary department, which was researching a film on child soldiers. Could I give them all my contacts?

The plight of the Karen people, who were forced into slave labour in the rainforest to build pipelines for oil companies (some of them British), was a tale of human suffering that needed to be told by any branch of the media that was interested. I handed over all the names and numbers I had, as well as details of the secret route through Thailand to get into Burma. Good girl.

Afterwards – and not for the first time – it seemed to me that we at the Guardian should be using our resources ourselves. Instead of providing contact numbers for any independent TV company prepared to get on the phone to a journalist, we should make our own films.

So it began. The idea was to reflect the ethos of the paper, by making films that make a positive difference in the areas the paper has traditionally campaigned on, such as human rights. We would use (mostly but by no means exclusively) the paper’s own talent to tell those stories.

But the Guardian needed help to do that. Print journalism is one thing, television is another. Although the reporting is much the same, the TV production process is much more laborious. Fiona-Lloyd Davies, an award winning producer/director, was recruited, and Jacqui Timberlake was brought in as the TV business brains – she knows how to budget for a three-week shoot in hell, and she won’t forget to sort out the mosquito nets.

In the year or so since Guardian Films started, we have hacked our way into a world in which about 1,000 British companies compete for a very limited number of broadcast slots, mainly on the BBC and Channel 4.

Our first two documentaries took us to the streets of northern England where, in collaboration with First Frame productions, we investigated the appalling number of prostitutes who were being murdered without anyone seeming to care they had been killed.

When we were ready to go it alone we embarked on our first documentary for the BBC, going on the hunt for the elusive Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb leader who is accused of war crimes including the murder of 7,000 men and boys at Srebrenica. Over the weeks we searched for him I began to feel he and his men were watching us from the hills of Montenegro.

During the past year we have used the talent inside and outside the paper to make films such as Jonathan Watts’ special for Channel 4 News on North Korea. Gary Younge, the Guardian’s New York correspondent, addressed some of the issues surrounding the Iraq war in a J’Accuse for Channel 4 on the new McCarthyism in George Bush’s America. We were also proud of our film for the BBC on the bloody conflict in the Congo. The report, which included devastating interviews with child soldiers, was described by critics as one of the most insightful pieces on British television last year.

There have been other wonderful pieces of journalism. We captured the expulsion of the Guardian’s Andrew Meldrum from Zimbabwe, secretly filming with him up to his dramatic exit. And we have been working with the “Baghdad Blogger”, Salam Pax, on a series giving his perspective on what is happening in his country.

Our biggest challenge now is to firmly establish Guardian Films in the TV production world – all the other producers seem to have been hanging out together for years. Our biggest advantage in that process is that we have access to a development team of hundreds of journalists. For most production companies the major difficulty is keeping the ideas flowing, but we can take them from our own paper and its writers – each issue of the Guardian is full of potential films. There is a benefit to the paper, too: much of the work that goes into the documentaries can be transferred into stories for print. Our ability to get a story into the paper and on air on the same day gives us the “big hit”, and a massive advantage over other independent production companies.

But big hits, and being big players, are not what matters most at Guardian Films. What’s important is putting high-quality journalism, on subjects that matter to us all, into people’s living rooms. Sometimes it’s even fun.

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The first in Guardian Films’ series of reports from Iraq by Salam Pax is due to be shown on Newsnight on Monday (BBC2, 10.30pm)